“A very serious situation”

EUROPE: Six months after Italy’s coronavirus crisis became an ominous signpost to the West, the World Health Organization is warning of “a very serious situation” unfolding again across Europe. COVID-19 caseloads in seven countries have doubled in the last two weeks, with hospitalizations and deaths now also on the rise.

CHINA: The COVID-19-might-have-come-from-a-lab idea has been trotted out and debunked many times, but here’s the latest—and in my opinion the best—reporting on it. Because it’s not yet going away. One revelation concerns the politics of science—that publicly funded labs worldwide have an interest in debunking a theory of lab origination. It could mean stricter oversight and possible defunding should it turn out SARS-CoV-2 got its start in a research lab. Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, said such a revelation, if confirmed, “would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.”

RWANDA: Paul Rusesabagina leveraged his celebrity status as the real-life hero behind Hotel Rwanda to launch scathing attacks on the country’s president for forever, Paul Kagame. Now, under arrest in Kigali, the former hotel manager who saved lives during the 1994 genocide tells how he was lured back to Rwanda, becoming one of a growing and alarming list of Kagame political opponents who turn up missing or dead.

INDIA: Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi, who has rescued children from slavery and trafficking for decades, fears that the coronavirus could reverse his efforts.

There’s no evidence of a trade-off between protecting people’s health and protecting the economy, according to the economic data compiled by Our World in Data. As well as saving lives, countries controlling the outbreak effectively have adopted the best economic strategy too. Examples: Taiwan, South Korea, and Lithuania.

BELARUS: Opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya urged the European Union on Monday to show courage and step up its support for her movement, as internal squabbles among Europe’s foreign ministers are keeping the EU from imposing sanctions on the Lukashenko government in Minsk. Tens of thousands of protesters braved a government crackdown over the weekend to continue demonstrating against last month’s reelection of President Alexander Lukashenko.

LEBANON: Last week, U.S. State Department counterterrorism official Nathan Sales told reporters that Hezbollah was storing ammonium nitrate—the chemical that blew up Beirut last month—all over Europe (“through Belgium to France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Switzerland”) to make explosives “to conduct major terrorist attacks.”

UNITED STATES: It was the Irishwoman Mary Mulrean who caused the trouble … and oh happy day, turns out Edith Wharton has written something none of us have read, but it’s here.